Anyone else having problems with much better contactless payments? Not been working for me all day!
Got an update from muchbetter, all contactless payments are currently down and will remain so for the near future. there is an issue with their vendor and they are now looking at alternative contactless providers. this could take some time. So it’s not just me, this is affecting everyone with muchbetter key fobs or wearables.
JeeUz… same thing happened to purewrist in the states… they were down for 4 months!
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Can we just start our own bank or credit union or something?
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What about a cyborg owned credit card network? Dangerous Card or something like that?
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haha possibly? but the payment networks would still boot the bank if they thought they were encouraging going against them.
the thing about banking that i didn’t realize until i started looking into this stuff, is that the banks have their own systems for passing money between themselves… wire transfers, ach, swift, and now PSD2 in the EU… but… this has nothing… absolutely nothing to do with point of sale payment transactions.
back in the day, credit card payments were just for credit, and you had to put the card into a little mechanical imprint device that ran a rubber roller over the card to deboss a carbon paper form (in triplicate) with the card information. this is why the numbers on credit cards have been embossed (raised / bumped) for so long… its a throwback to this. anyway you would sign the credit form and the store would keep a copy and you would get a copy and a copy would, i assume, get sent to the credit remittance company so the store could get paid. with the invention of the telephone modem, electronic payment networks and cards with magnetically readable stripes became a thing… and that meant stores could get paid almost immediately if the transaction was electronic vs paper… and then banks created debit cards that would pull money not from a line of unsecured credit but from your actual bank account… but this is still a trick from the payment network… for a bank to enable this they have to suckle at the teat of the payment network of choice… that’s why some banks issue debit and credit cards for mastercard only and others go with visa… they are just as much slaves to the will of the network as we are.
banks in US and around the world were fine with this though… they could let customers transact at point of sale for payments and get a little cut of the action (merchant fees) and not have to build their out their own networks… but in the EU the people (not the banks) were like “hey fuck this” and passed the PSD2 law which does a couple things… 1) it caps the % fees payment networks can charge the merchant (you by proxy), and 2) it establishes “a regulatory framework that ensures payments across the EU are secure, easy and efficient” which exists outside of current payment networks. unfortunately, like most government regulatory frameworks, the actual technological outcome so far has been… less than “easy and efficient” to use.
so the key point i want to make here is that even though it seems like mastercard and visa credit cards and debit cards seem fully and basically seamlessly integrated into the international banking system, there are huge fucking seams everywhere, and where there’s a seam, there are rules to comply with and fees to pay.
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But IF it was to become a thing, the rfid diagnostic card would be cool to use as the payment card 
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